And what have I been working on all week at work? Well, lots of stuff, but since you asked, I’ve been working on something that’s simultaneously a pain in the ass and something I enjoy: editing.
In mid-December, I attended a symposium on pension funds, where a roundtable of seven experts discussed property fundamentals, cap rates, investing and other such topics. As my magazine does at all events like this, we had some guys there who recorded all that was said and later transcribed it verbatim to a Word document.
An 18,500 word Word document.
And guess whose job it is to boil that down to three to four pages for the magazine? You guessed it. (Me.) “Three to four pages,” you say. “That sounds like a lot of text.” Well, with the headline, deck, photos, captions and other graphical elements that will be added to distract people from the dry subject matter, it works out to only about 3,500 words.
Hiya! My editing skills are unstoppable! I grabbed my red pen (and yellow highlighter after it started getting nasty) and took it to that fatty text. It was easy going at first, summarizing the moderators’ often-rambling questions and taking out the unnecessary words and phrases we use when speaking (“well,” “I think,” “I mean,” “really,” “actually” and many more). Then there was removing repetition. Next came the heavy-duty condensing, which got to be a challenge because of my relative unfamiliarity with the subject matter.
I felt mighty after I got it down to 10,000 words. Sweating bullets, I smushed it down to 5,000 or so, and then it got really tough. In fact, I ended up pawning off the cursedly wordy thing to a coworker today to knock it down further—I’d read and re-read it so many times that I had memorized large chunks and none of it was sounding any more cuttable. But be cut it must. It’s a labor of love.